Make a lens review-style image collage

Michael Berg

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Hello all,

I recently bought a vintage lens for my Fuji X-T4, and I was kind of excited not just to use it but to share my findings about the lens in terms of sharpness and other aspects.

So I took a bunch of shots of the same scene, at varying apertures (F5.6, F8, F11 etc).

What I want now is some relatively easy way to create a montage image from these shots, showing the same 1:1 area from each shot like this:

[F5.6 image][F8 image]
[F11 image][F16 image]

Etc - you have probably seen similar collages many times on lens review sites.

Besides the 1:1 crop I want to include a text on each "part" that shows what aperture setting was used. I don't need to have that picked up from Exif data automatically, just a simple way to add text to each image crop would be perfectly fine.

I'm thinking some command like this:

$ makecollage area=100,100,450,450 imageFolder=/some/directory/myphotos targetImageWidth=1000 imagesPerRow=2 dest=/some/directory/myfinalcollage.jpg

Text on each image could be sidecar files like this:

/some/directory/myphotos$ ls
DSCF_0001.jpg
DSCF_0001.txt
DSCF_0002.jpg
DSCF_0002.txt

This is all just to show what sort of thing I'm trying to achieve. Also excuse the Linux, hope you Windows and Mac people get the gist of it.

I'm looking for *any* way to do this, that doesn't involve me opening up each image, cropping, adding text,saving, then opening up each image at the end, placing them next to eachother and saving the whole thing once again. I got tired just writing that sentence .. :-)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Mike
 
I just capture screen shots from Capture One. Capture One is really nice for comparing images. I forget that other software is so limited until I watch some YouTuber with Lightroom. Here's an example:

73c6546490f84306be744ab7d85fd52e.jpg.png

Capture One can rename files on import. I have it set to name by focal length, aperture, and lens in that order. Then I can sort the files by file name. The built-in sort can sort by any of those fields already without renaming.

At my last job found a small program that created proof sheets in InDesign. That was very fast and flexible. The output was a standard InDesign document. You would probably still need to crop and align manually. Adobe has a Contact Sheet script in Photoshop that is much less useful.
 
Last edited:
Hello all,

I recently bought a vintage lens for my Fuji X-T4, and I was kind of excited not just to use it but to share my findings about the lens in terms of sharpness and other aspects.

So I took a bunch of shots of the same scene, at varying apertures (F5.6, F8, F11 etc).

What I want now is some relatively easy way to create a montage image from these shots, showing the same 1:1 area from each shot like this:

[F5.6 image][F8 image]
[F11 image][F16 image]

Etc - you have probably seen similar collages many times on lens review sites.

Besides the 1:1 crop I want to include a text on each "part" that shows what aperture setting was used. I don't need to have that picked up from Exif data automatically, just a simple way to add text to each image crop would be perfectly fine.

I'm thinking some command like this:

$ makecollage area=100,100,450,450 imageFolder=/some/directory/myphotos targetImageWidth=1000 imagesPerRow=2 dest=/some/directory/myfinalcollage.jpg

Text on each image could be sidecar files like this:

/some/directory/myphotos$ ls
DSCF_0001.jpg
DSCF_0001.txt
DSCF_0002.jpg
DSCF_0002.txt

This is all just to show what sort of thing I'm trying to achieve. Also excuse the Linux, hope you Windows and Mac people get the gist of it.

I'm looking for *any* way to do this, that doesn't involve me opening up each image, cropping, adding text,saving, then opening up each image at the end, placing them next to eachother and saving the whole thing once again. I got tired just writing that sentence .. :-)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Mike
Hi Mike,

I am not up to speed on the latest version, but I have done similar things with ImageMagick. Probably more options than you need here, but lots of tools to manipulate images.







You can probably do what you need from the command line or from a simple shell script. If you want to get fancy, there are other options. You should be able to call both ImageMagick and Exiftool from Perl, but I have not dug into that, and it is arguably overkill for what you want.


Lots of help online if you can figure out what search terms to use.



Hope this helps.
 
If you're familiar with scripting language (specifically AppleScript, VBScript or JavaScript), you could probably write a script for Photoshop to automate your tasks.

Adobe Photoshop Scripting
 
Hi,

That's a great idea, I hadn't considered what programs like Capture One can do by themselves in terms of comparing multiple shots. In fact it just occurred to me that my normal image viewer (XnView) can do something similar.

Definitely going to expore that. Thanks for the suggestion!
 
Hi,

Oh yes ImageMagick - the swiss army knife of image manipulation. Is there any program on Ubuntu that doesn't have some obscure dependency on one of its libraries? I doubt it :-)

Great suggestions and I think I can definitely work out some kind of bash script using those commands.

First I want to try using XnView to line up all the images for comparison, and just take a screenshot of that like someone else suggested. All things being equal that is a shortcut.
 
If you're familiar with scripting language (specifically AppleScript, VBScript or JavaScript), you could probably write a script for Photoshop to automate your tasks.

Adobe Photoshop Scripting
I am a software developer so yes I'm very familiar with those concepts.

However I was hoping to avoid that for once :-) Thinking that someone might have already done all the legwork.

Also I'm on a Linux platform so Photoshop is out of the question.
 

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